The Planet Protectors Laboratory (PPL) is a Youth Lab for Environmental Justice specifically designed to advocate and communicate core environmentalist themes to low-income youth aged 6-18 within East Baltimore's housing projects and their families.
Low-income youth engage in hands-on field projects within their urban ecologies and learn about how climate change and other environmental factors influence the quality of life for our air, water, earth, and species. Youth also develop an understanding of how the health of the Patapsco River Watershed (and other Maryland Watersheds) and the Chesapeake Bay influence the quality of urban life and forestall problems like flooding.
Developing strong, broad and deep ethics for anti-pollution, anti-littering, anti-trash, clean energy, conservation, and preservation are key in the PPL's twice weekly after-school learning sessions held within the housing projects and at the McKim Center.
See below for the kinds of Meaningful Watershed Educational Experiences (MWEE) valued in the PPL.
Youth hone their voices by engaging in a field practice to identify and analyze (by writing and drawing) salutogens (elements that appear to benefit their environment) and pathogens (elements that appear not to benefit their environment) in their urban home environments.
Both scientific and humanitarian analysis is key because what may first seem like a pathogen may not be so. For example, youth learn that labeling a homeless person as a pathogen is inappropriate unless the person may be littering--systems that leave people unhoused are the pathogen--and the act of littering that is pathogenic instead of the person.
PhotoVoice uses photography or videography, especially polaroid cameras in our PPL.
The image on this web-page depicts youth executing an EcoVoice project with street chalk.
In this learning series, youth engage in a variety of urban growing projects to explore themes of sustenance, habitat protection, conservation, and preservation.
1) Strong tree growing and canopies in urban areas like our East Baltimore community mitigate a variety of environmental injustices, including cooling, aiding against flooding, and protecting/feeding tree-living species. Planting, growing, and gardening (both indoor and outdoors) cultivates healthy living, sustainability, and conservation. Since 2019, we have planted a limited number of trees (due to city and private business restorations), while maintaining them (watering, mulching, weeding, and protecting), and we have planted tree via air layering (a tree cloning process).
2) Indoors, we have guided youth in growing mushrooms, herbs, and greens.
3) We have developed terrariums for live species (earthworms and beetles especially) and learned about habitat protection and conservation.
4) We analyze the quality of development projects in the neighborhood and assess the state of preservation and how such ethical work effects the people implicated in environmentalism.
Listen In/Speak Out involves youth listening to presentations (by their peers, teachers, or guest educators) about key environmental problems for which they then develop media campaigns to teach themselves how to speak out about environmental injustices within their networks. For example, one project involved learning about the complex environmental dangers of palm oil and then building campaigns on TikTok and Instagram that educated their families and peers about palm oil's dangers.
In this module of the PPL, each month youth identify, study, and incorporate into their diet or foodways vegetables and fruits that elevate environmental justice.
Field trips to water treatment facilities, camp grounds, and other experiences and sites that elevate environmental justice are a key component of the PPL.
Youth build projects that solve everyday environmental problems involving littering, trash, and pollution that they see in their neighborhoods. One ongoing project involved observing that the drains at the end of their blocks within the housing projects are often clogged by trash and litter, contributing to flooding problems. Youth gather together, don masks, gloves, and other safety measures (if appropriate) and use pickers (long handled devices to pick up items) to clean out the drains within their neighborhoods while learning about the role that drainage and other measures play in protecting the area's watersheds.